License

Alrighty, first attempt at frame by frame animation with Inkscape. The glow came out great on the Jewels but the horn effect could use some work.Frame by frame animation is quite annoying, with Inkscape you can't do any sort of preview until you've exported your .png's and compiled them as a .swf file.This was mostly a test to see if it was possible to do this without using Flash at all.

For a first attempt at a frame by frame animation this is pretty good. But now on to the critique.

The circle halo around the gems would be a little more blurred around the edge, and that detracts from the "look through the ground" magic idea.

Rarity herself is pretty well done, but her iris sections look a little too big and her iris special sections look too defined. Also her eyelashes don't hug as close to the eye down near the bottom and that looks wrong. You did the hair gradients great.

Because it's just a frame by frame I can see how that would be hard to do more complex magic such as Rarity's horn, which appears choppy and not free flowing.

As a last remark, the animation is so big on my HD screen here that not all of it fits, try scaling it down a little in size so most people on DA can appreciate it better!.

So this animation is actually good art wise, but in the animation it has some problems, for example, ponies body's aren't that round in the bottom, the eyelashes are kind of off, because theiy are more straight in the corners, the far eyelash is kind of like the default one, rarity's one is special, for the horn magic animation i recommend watching grant beaudette's video on magic,, the one in the animation is kind of choppy.For the hair I only see two small problems, the darker parts in the end of the hair doesn't actually have an outline, just the solid dark colour, i always recommend using flash, scalable vector graphics can hold animation, but they are pretty limited.I hope this critique allows you to get better.

The Artist has requested Critique on this Artwork

Oh lordy do I know your pain. I made this Derpy thing [link] frame-by-frame in Inkscape; it was atrociously long and hard. If I'd had Flash back then, drawing Derpy would have been the longest part of it.

The composition is really great - shows the important parts well. There are few issues with the vectoring technique, but nothing too major.

As far as the animation goes...

The horn animation needs some more detail. The show's magic animation always has two layers, which are nearly identical, with one being scaled down. You could for instance just duplicate the magic shapes, scale them down and use them in a different frame, like so:

While the horn animation is pretty complicated for a beginner (and frankly, even I'm not sure how I managed it), the scaling shows the ideas of SVG animation pretty well. And I even commented it.

Furthermore, you can use SVGRender to make frames out of an animated SVG. No transparency yet, but it's sufficient. This means you can easily export the animation (as PNGs) in 30 FPS and use APNG, GIF, MPEG or even flash as a container.

What you did with the horn animation is simply inspiring. I chose to leave the stars out of my original animation because I'm lazy. I've tried your "balls" tutorial and I got frequent errors so I've put that away for now but I will most likely pick it back up when I have some spare time. Thank you for the tips and the advice about abandoning frame based animation with SVG's. I kinda just wanted to find out if it was possible. In a past life I taught middle school students basic code for robots so hopefully I can get the hang of this.

Hey, I actually commented that horn code as well - clever past self! I seriously want to make some kind of SVG animation tutorial, but... well, it's a really broad topic. It only works for people who have the curiosity and some love for coding, as well as graphical arts. It requires you to branch out quite a bit.

I looked on Youtube and there is NOTHING on this subject, pony or otherwise. For now I can be happy with some of the comments inside the .SVG It is definitely a broad subject with a small interested audience.